


Unheimlich

by CynaraM



Series: Friendship is Unnecessary [3]
Category: Johannes Cabal - Jonathan L. Howard
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon Era, Gen, Horror, Humor, Occult, platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-11 05:10:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3315317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CynaraM/pseuds/CynaraM
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cabal and Leonie are under threat from a mutual enemy; they hide out while Johannes works on a solution.  But where could they hide together?  Follows the events of "The Rolling Fire."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In which an invitation is extended

Leonie abandoned her letter-writing and, with the air of someone throwing caution to the winds, opened a notebook. She bent over a page scrawled with light and darkened squares which bore arrows, notes, and cryptic sigils. The cafe lights flickered over the arcane diagrams and battle plans.

It was, in fact, a chess game in progress, with a few moves recorded and other possibilities drawn in. Previous pages held earlier stages of the game. She frowned at it. Cabal’s reply was taking longer than usual to arrive, and she’d started to regret her move. It had opened up a weakness, and she was now glumly planning escape routes for a knight.

A shadow fell across her table and she closed her notebook. A severely dressed man pulled out the chair opposite, lifting it slightly to avoid the unpleasant scraping sound.

She blinked. Cabal had brought a cup of tea to the table and was sipping it smugly. 

“Mr. …” No, not his real name. She didn’t really want him set by the heels and burned on the quadrangle. She flicked through several alternatives before settling on one designed to remove that subtle smirk. “Joe. How lovely to see you, Joe." The smugness curdled into seething irritation in an instant, and she smiled genuinely at him. Cabal was so self-serious it was a public service to tease him. "Does the possibility of being recognized never concern you?” she asked with apparently genuine curiosity.

He set his cup precisely in the saucer, the gaslight of the cafe glinting off his neatly clipped pale-blond hair. “My face is not so widely publicized in England. I have been careful.”

“But we’re drinking tea in a café frequented by the criminology department,” her tone implying ‘you dolt.’ "Earlier in the term, one of my dons brought your wanted posters to class, for pity’s sake. My interest in - pardon me - the psychological pathology of necromancy is considered sensational, but everyone reads the sensational stuff. Who knows how many people in this room have heard your name.” Her voice was conversational, but she was tucking her letter paper into her portfolio and securing her pen in her purse.

“The subject of my work arose in one of your classes?”

Leonie waved it aside. “The don was humouring me. I think he’s trying to work up the courage to ask me to dinner. Never mind him.” She rose and left the table, donning her coat. Cabal looked from his teacup to her and followed reluctantly.

“This man is paying you court with necromancy seminars.” They passed out of the café and into the rainy afternoon. 

“Yes, including the life and work of J. Cabal, necromancer.” Her social tone had slipped somewhat, but they were in the open street and were less likely to be overheard. It was beginning to sleet, and Cabal unfurled a large black umbrella and offered her an arm in a put-upon manner. “So I recommend you not drop in like this unless you want to be subject to more impertinent enquiries than mine.” She frowned. “And yes, I suppose Professor Wilson’s advances might be unethical, but I don’t think he understands that. He offered you up like a happy hunting dog with a duck.” 

“He is in a position of authority." Cabal's expression was austere.

“And, thankfully, he has continued to approach me as timidly and slowly as some tiny forest creature. I’ve had good luck so far. Evading the nastier ones can be hard work, especially if you want a career in the field.” Cabal sneered in response. "Is it his position of authority or his interest in me that exercises you? Are you a prude, Cabal? A lesser woman might find that funny.’ Her voice turned affectionate. "I was raised to be a prude, bless Dad's heart, but it didn’t entirely take."

Cabal looked down at the blonde mane by his shoulder. Leonie had taken his arm but was holding it with a trace of awkwardness; he wondered if the wound still pained her. Distracted, he asked the question floating across his mind. “Why do you put up with all of it?”

She turned and looked up at him, blue eyes showing her irritation. “And my alternatives are? Going home to take care of father? Marrying well? Choosing a carefree life of necromancy?” Cabal went still behind his eyes for a moment, and she knew she’d somehow struck a nerve. “Never mind. You can play career advisor later. Why are you here?"

“Take us somewhere quiet.” Leonie shrugged, and although she hadn’t noticed it, her mood lightened considerably. She had been composing a letter to her father and had been trying to suggest a busy (though proper) social life and fulfilling studies likely to lead to a respectable career. Her social life was not busy; her studies were not fulfilling; the only ones that did interest her were not the kind that led to a government post or a departmental Chair. 

Oh, she had gone out to dances and met some nice young men. She had chatted with some nice young ladies, mostly here for social work or psychology degrees. She'd had pleasant conversations and dull evenings that made her want to be in the library or back home with dad, or... somewhere else. She wasn’t sure where. She hadn’t exactly missed Cabal, but he did break up the monotony.

She turned them away from the main street and towards the river. They walked in silence. The river was not the sort of limpid, purling stream frequented by punting undergraduates and deep-chested rowing teams in matching sweaters but a broad, deep channel flanked by high stone embankments. Cold iron rails were meant to guard pedestrians from the drop, but only Leonie and Cabal walked there to see the severe lines of the bridge clothed in soft curtains of falling sleet. 

They stopped at the rail, thick flakes of paint and rust flaking off under Leonie's grip. “You're beginning to worry me, Cabal. I don't think you dropped by for half a cup of tea and a walk in the sleet." 

"No. Twiccian has been back to his lair. I saw signs when I returned."

She didn’t understand at first. “So you went back? I suppose that makes sense. I haven't had a chess move from you in... Four days. Hm." Cabal stayed impassive but felt obscurely embarrassed by his reliability. "Well, we knew he would return after he escaped. That's been kept quiet, too. What did you give him that got him out of the asylum?"

"Something rare that wouldn't cause too much mayhem. I wouldn't have given it to him, not even for the information he gave, if I'd known the full extent of his madness." Cabal's lip curled. "I spent more time in his lair, reading his notes. I believe he will target us, Miss Barrow. Our having seen his lair is enough to make him frightened of us, and he kills anything that frightens him."

Leonie nodded slowly. That was consistent with the few published sources. Twiccian was terrified of any threat to his safety.

Cabal was nonplussed by this slow nodding. He had expected anger, blame. People were generally terrible at taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Leonie just gave a final crisp nod and asked “what do you recommend?"

Cabal was looking at her oddly. “I recommend you take a brief leave of absence from the university, and that we hide while I develop a solution. Twiccian has likely tried to scry us. I am difficult to find, but you are not." 

Leonie took a moment to consider this. “Scry. You mean Arthur Twiccian has been peeping at me?”

"Well, yes. But probably not with an intention of violating your privacy as such. He wishes to establish a connection that will allow him to use magical effects to kill you."

“You’re not very good at reassurance."

Cabal was growing exasperated. “All I am saying is that Twiccian has not been attempting to glimpse your tentlike sleeping garments. Much the reverse, probably. What he has been trying...”

“…that’s a bit rich coming from the Lord of the Chinese Dressing Gown…”

“…trying to do is establish a connection he can use to ‘carry’ magical effects. It is difficult and prey to distortion by other magic, places of significance, thresholds, and so on, so it must be built up over time. It is much harder than…” he looked like he was casting about for an alternative to his next words, but gave it up and pronounced them gingerly " _casting a spell_... in person, but Twiccian prefers to arrange such things remotely." His dignity lost the internal battle against petty retaliation. "And that was not my dressing gown, it was Herr Meissner's, whose identity I was borrowing. And whose clothing I was borrowing. I would like to know on whom you blame your nightwear.”

Leonie ignored him majestically. "So where will we go?"

"First, to your rooms to pack a suitcase and write letters: one to the dean, explaining your urgent family business, and one to your father, explaining what you like - short of my involvement. Then to the train station."

She considered the plan briefly. "Agreed. But you aren't coming. Men aren't allowed in the residence, and I'm not having you glowering at the porter for half an hour. It would take my father about ten seconds to recognize you from a description. We’d better meet at the train station.” A thought struck her. "And for what conditions am I packing? Will we be walking? Will I be outdoors much?" 

Cabal looked unhappy, she realized. "That sort of thing," he said, gesturing generally at, she supposed, the walking skirt and blouse she wore under her raincoat, "would be fine." 

Leonie was looking at him questioningly. He tried again. "You are going for a week-end at a country house. But you needn't dress for dinner."

***

And he had refused to elaborate. Some empty place where Twiccian would find it difficult to locate them? Overseas, perhaps, where his power might not reach them? But Cabal hadn’t told her to pack a passport. She decided to bring hers, in case.

She reached her door. Her hand was on the knob when she smelled wet clay. Not unlikely, given the weather, but significant quantities of mud were usually kept at bay by the charwomen. Likely it was just Marie's field hockey equipment, piled in the hallway.

There was mud near her own door, she noticed. Feeling like a fool, she picked up the sturdy hooked hockey stick - more like an African club, she thought, when wielded over the head - and grimaced as her bad arm twinged. The demonic symbiont in Twiccian’s lair had torn her up pretty thoroughly, and the wounds were slow to heal. She pushed her unlocked door in. 

Sitting in the hard university-issue 'easy' chairs by the coal grate were two grinning skeletons. They were clothed in sadly tattered and dust-smeared chancellarian robes. She would have wondered how they had come from the college chapel to here, but it was possible they had simply blended in with the rest of the faculty. The skeletons finally processed her presence and started to struggle to their feet. She felt uncertain for a moment, but help was not at hand, and she’d seen this done before. She closed the door behind her with one heel.


	2. In which a journey is made

Leonie met Cabal outside the train station an hour or so later. He was irked. “What kept you? And why do you have a valise and two bags of… laundry?"

"Oh, you know us girls, Cabal. We can't pack just one bag of... laundry. By the by, where do you recommend I ditch - is that's the word one uses? - two bags of formerly animated bones? The word is suggestive, but I don't have any ditches handy. And are you certain Twiccian isn’t watching you instead? I didn’t have any of this trouble until today."

He took a second to process the chain of events. “What did you use?” 

“Field hockey stick. Marie across the hall plays.”

“Do the laundry bags contain any other articles, or do they have, say, your address printed on them somewhere?”

“No.”

“Then leave them there.” He nodded to the trash bin. “Even if someone does look, we’ll be miles away.” He handed her a ticket. “Leave the train three stops before the destination. Take the next train leaving that station from platform two. Disembark that train when you see me.” And he was gone. 

She should have expected as much, she thought, shifting her suitcase in her hand. She did as he directed and an hour later she watched the iron-grey ditches fly by the train window. She tried to distract herself from the burning in her arm by thinking about her situation. Then she decided she’d rather distract herself from her situation by concentrating on the burning in her arm. Even her book wasn’t helping. Well, it helped. 

The train from platform two left only ten minutes after hers arrived, making her scramble for a ticket and a porter to transfer her valise. That train took her partway back to the city and then north. It was not long before she saw Cabal on a platform, Gladstone bag impatiently in hand. 

He swatted the porter away and took Leonie’s suitcase. 

“Did you have a pleasant journey?” she called after him as he moved away from her through the crowd. He did not reply. She followed him to another platform where they boarded an eastbound train. 

Cabal would not talk. He made minuscule encrypted notes in his book and ignored her completely. She wondered what had put him in such a pet. Normally she could goad him into a waspish reply, but today he was… moody? She had given up on him and returned to her book, ostentatiously displaying its lurid cover to Cabal, when a hole in reality opened inside their train car. 

It was about seven feet in diameter, and it hovered a few inches above the carpet. It was full of swirling, churning clouds and mists. For a moment she thought the side had been torn off the train, but it was dark wherever the portal went. 

A wind, warm at first but rapidly chilling to the temperature of the chilly English weather, blew past them into the hovering disc. The wind-speed accelerated, carrying away Leonie’s novel as she suddenly gripped her seat with a dreadful suspicion. Cabal had already, curse him, improvised a lashing for his bag and was employed in tying himself to his seat. Leonie belatedly reached for her scarf; it had seemed elegant at the time of purchase, but now looked only flimsy. She’d have to hope. Bracing her feet against the floor, she looped it through the armrests twice and tied a quick knot. Cabal looked sourly at her solution, but the roar of the wind was already too loud to allow him to comment. The mists within the portal thinned, allowing her to glimpse a dark, barren landscape. It was attempting to carry them to Canada, or possibly to some place much, much farther from England.

The drag of the wind around them was immense, and Leonie pressed herself as deeply into the stingy railway cushioning as she could. Cabal was affecting insouciance, as usual; he was craning his neck politely to peer into the portal, like a genteel tram-passenger staring at a street accident. Under different circumstances, Leonie would have relished the rapid change in his expression as one of the armrests to which he was secured fractured. It gave a deep “crack” audible even over the wind, and Cabal was briefly airborne. Her heart in her mouth, she reached out to him, trusting to her scarf to keep her tethered, but he had caught himself on the second armrest, and was beyond her reach. Then the wind dropped suddenly, dumping him to the floor.

A final petulant gust out of the portal set everything in a whirl and brought a faint and evil smell from the bleak wastes. She detached her hands from the armrests, wincing as her arm protested. “Are you all right?” she asked. 

Cabal grunted, seated himself, patted his hair back into place, and extracted his notebook from the interior pocket of his coat. Leonie watched in disbelief as he went back to his note-taking. She tried to go back to her book, but (as she did not know) it was even now landing on the head of a surprised squamous horror. Giving a short, harsh sigh, she opened her notebook. She flipped by a scribbled eight by eight grid covered with notes. 

Faced with Cabal’s put-upon silence, she felt ridiculous about the small surge of satisfaction that had leapt inside her a month ago, when the terse note arrived in her mail cubby with a chess move. The man was appalling. He looked like an undergraduate having lunch with his great-aunt, all ill-concealed boredom and reluctant duty. She was glad she hadn’t bought a chess set. Even at the time it had seemed too much of a statement of confidence. She turned to a clean page and started a list of the missed appointments for which she would apologize when she returned.

They disembarked at a provincial station, boarded another train, and at Cabal’s instigation left it almost immediately. They took a further train north and Leonie almost hit him when they disembarked again and, instead of going anywhere they could get a sandwich or even a bloody cup of tea, skulked inside the station until springing upon another train like a pair of peckish pumas as it left the platform . 

The weather improved somewhat as the day warmed, the sleet softening to rain and then to sprinkles hurled on gusty winds. The sky turned dove-gray.

She thought she may as well ask. “Where are we going?”

He ignored her.

***

The train had wound around and up and down green hills for the better part of an hour. The engine sounded increasingly aggrieved with every incline. Once or twice the train stopped for sheep to be moved off the tracks. Cabal ignored the stops, seemed not to notice them, in fact. 

They pulled into a small rural station, soft yellow and red from weathered brick and rusty iron. Cabal had abandoned his notebook and was, uncharacteristically, muttering. “No other way. Greenland… but no. The inn? Worse. No help for it…” Like a man answering the executioner’s call, Cabal stood. “Miss Barrow. Shall we.” He walked out without a backward look.

The porter on the platform fetched Leonie’s valise with a smile that curdled to watchful sullenness when he saw the black shape behind her. She was looking through her handbag for a tip and did not see his reaction when the loathsome Cabal took the valise and pointedly offered the pleasant young lady his arm.

She had many opportunities to see the reaction as they left the train station. Polite nods for the stranger, a double-take at the tall figure at her side, fear, revulsion, hate. Incredulity. A boy laughed and pointed. Cabal’s jaw was clenched so tightly she thought he might crack a tooth. He tapped his pocket as if looking for his blue spectacles; they were now in Canada or Leng or wherever that portal had led. 

Passing the village green (was Cabal taking the most ostentatious route to their destination, she wondered?) she saw a tall man leaving the pub in a police sergeant’s uniform. She smiled; when she’d been a little girl, her father had worn that hat. The sergeant boggled as thoroughly but a hair more subtly than the other villagers. Cabal nodded warily. The sergeant nodded back, without interrupting his slackfaced stare. Worry was dawning on his brow.

Cabal retrieved a bicycle from under the eaves of a nearby building. It had not been locked, Leonie noticed. With that one simple thing, she could deny the truth no longer. Everyone knew him here; everyone hated him. Johannes Cabal had brought her home. 

***

Almost. Cabal walked his bicycle in stony silence, the valise strapped to a rack on its rear fender. Leonie simply had no idea where to start, so she walked in silence too. They passed out of the village. They met no more of its residents, but Leonie saw curtains being twitched aside as they walked along the narrow road.

They passed into the countryside. The wind had driven away the rain, at least, and the road was too stony to be very muddy. It was beautiful country, hilly and stern but the hills were tiring her out, and while her shoes were perfectly good for a day’s walk on pavement, this was trying her ankles. 

At last the path wound up a slope and left them looking down into a valley like a green dish in the hills. It had patches of trees, and the little road wound in and out of it. No sheep grazed there, and no farmhouses could be seen for miles around, but on the road, up the far side a short distance, there sat a house. A row house. A century-old townhouse, its stones still blackened with the soot of an industrial city, uprooted from some suburban-garden-development-for-an-emerging-middle-class and plopped here. There was a flower garden, and a garden wall, and a little gate in front. Cabal was surprised to find he had stopped at the crest of the hill, and started walking again. 

She said the first words either of them had uttered since the train. “I don’t think Twiccian would like it.”

He looked at it with her. “I suppose it isn’t one’s idea of a lair. I should warn you….” He seemed to run out of words.

“No, I didn’t think it housed your little wife and six apple-cheeked children. Does anyone else live there?”

His brows had drawn together. “No. Although I suppose it depends on definitions of ‘live.’ ” He paused. “You didn’t want to know the location of my home, Miss Barrow. _Voila_.”

There was nothing to say to that. She was glad, at least, that they had climbed their last picturesque hill.


	3. Will you walk into my parlour?

They stood before the low gate and stone wall that bordered Cabal’s house. It was well-kept, though not lovingly tended. He leaned his bicycle against the wall and held out a hand to keep Leonie from preceding him into the garden. He opened the gate, walked through, shook his head at her when she tried to follow him, and shut it behind. She stood outside, her considerable confusion turning to annoyance five times as rapidly as it would with a randomly selected person. 

Cabal stood on the garden path and cleared his throat. A small rustling of which she had not been consciously aware faded into stillness. 

Cabal looked around the small plot once. “This is Miss Leonie Barrow. She is not to be harmed. She is not to be touched. You are not even to show yourselves to her. This applies starting now, and continues until it is explicitly rescinded by me. Should any one of you appalling little creatures put a wingtip out of place retribution will be swift, brutal, and ferrous. Is this understood?"

A sursurrus of irritation troubled the bushes and perennials, and then a chorus of small, cracked voices from every corner said “yes, Johannes Cabal."

“Have you forgotten the dahlias?"

The voices were chastened, this time: “no, Johannes Cabal.” 

“Very well. You may enter, Miss Barrow.” 

Leonie found that her enthusiasm for a chair and a cup of tea had faded considerably, but wandering the fells pursued by portals and skeletal chancellors wasn’t appealing either. She entered the garden tentatively, peered gingerly at the undergrowth. Cabal walked through his front door, leaving it ajar behind him. She climbed the steps and took the doorknob.

“Good-bye, Miss Barrow” chimed the garden as she shut the door behind her. 

****

Cabal had given her a cursory tour. “Make yourself at home on the ground floor, in your room, and in the bathing room. All other areas of the house, Miss Barrow, are to be avoided. The contents of the rooms range from the private to the upsetting to the dangerous. The gardens….' He paused, considering. “Do not go in the gardens. Also, should you leave the immediate property, you will be vulnerable to Twiccian’s attacks."

“Outside your wards?"

“Yes. I beg you will not attempt to coordinate mealtimes. My schedule is irregular, and I will be much occupied with finding a way out of this unpleasant situation.” Cabal saw her raised brow. “Unpleasant to us both, I am sure” he added, as if making a concession to politeness. “If you have any questions, leave a note on the newel post to the attic. I will see it there. Eventually. Help yourself to the kitchen and its contents.” And he had vanished into the attic. 

She wandered.

The house had been tastefully if modestly decorated perhaps fifteen years ago. It had been capably maintained since then. A little fraying on one chair in the parlour, but almost no wear to the library. A square dust-mark on the mantlepiece where something had rested until recently.

Wandering the library, she looked at titles. Many were in German, including poetry and a collection of Shakespeare's plays in translation. Bookplates and inscriptions. Gottfried. Liese. Ex libris Cabal. A cultured family of broad interests: science, the arts, history. She found a small card catalogue in a dusty box on a shelf.

The first floor had her room, a washroom, a locked door, and a door into a room at the front of the house, which she assumed was the master bedroom and Cabal’s. Hers was narrow, overlooking the back garden and providing access to a storage room of the seasonal detritus that accumulates in families. The room contained a single bed, neatly made with thriftily turned linens. It made space for bookshelves and perhaps the telescope that was propped in a corner. 

The bookshelf in her room was a mixture of boyish adventure ( _Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe_ ) and science, including several university-level astronomy texts. Latin, German, English, French, Italian. Only a little Greek. A magesterial-looking volume entitled _Recherches Sur Les Principaux Problemes de l’Astronomie Nautique_. She took it off the shelf and a London bookseller's card fell out: "The fellow said I shouldn't desecrate it by writing on the flyleaf, so: felicitations on your natal day and _Isch gratelier Dir aach sum Geburtstach_ , little brother. Horst.” 

Horst. Leonie repeated the name silently, slipped the card back into the book, and replaced it on the shelf. There was a tattered two-volume Sherlock Holmes, rather less dusty than its neighbours. Copies of _The Moonstone_ and _King Solomon's Mines_ , not much read. An anatomy textbook and a folder of papers. Was that slim, elaborately bound volume at the end of the shelf an anthology of poetry, maybe? She felt, suddenly, that this examination was turning up too much that Cabal would prefer not to discuss. She went downstairs. 

She worked on her paper in the library. She took a further stab at writing her father a chatty letter, but it foundered on the ticking of the grandfather clock and the noises of the garden pixies as they attempted to trap sparrows in the apple tree. Oh, hell. Well, she’d always meant to read Goethe. 

It was well into the evening, and she was rapping on the attic door. Three hours of Faust had tested her student German to the limit ( _Wissensqualm_?) and given her a pounding headache. Gretchen was never going to get a good line. “Come out and eat, Cabal."

The door was jerked open a crack, a blue-grey eye peered out of a bright room, and Leonie heard a clunk, as of a large handgun being deposited on a table. “It is not necessary for you to wait on me, Miss…” His eye fell to the plate of sandwiches she carried. “I thought you cooked."

“Only in kitchens, not medieval torture chambers with iceboxes, and even I am constrained by ingredients. Are fresh vegetables things that happen to other people, Cabal?" She couldn't see into the room. 

“So you know a fresh vegetable from tinned? What a gastronomic Englishwoman you are." 

“Come downstairs and eat."

“Why this sudden excess of concern?"

“Because if I read one more stanza of Faust, I will be begging you for a grave to desecrate. Indulge me. Eat something." 

“If you are considering contracting infernal assistance, Miss Barrow, I can recommend a more dependable primer.” But he exited the room and locked the attic door behind himself.

"Would you rather bring your gun?"

“Yes."

Leonie led the way to the parlour, where she’d laid a fire. It flickered and caught as they ate their sandwiches.

“What, O magus, is your plan? Do I get to find out?”

He nodded. “Did I not mention it? I am looking for a way to block Twiccian’s remote effects upon us. He will not come in person, so it ought to afford us some measure of protection from him."

“Is there anything I can do to help?"

To give him credit, Cabal appeared to consider it for a moment, then shook his head. “It requires fairly abstruse knowledge, Miss Barrow.” 

She nodded and smiled politely. Damn it, back to Goethe. "I suppose I shouldn’t keep you from your work.” The wind howled and rain rattled against the window. 

He nodded and started to rise, but halted, half-standing. “Would you care to continue our game?” Surprised, she just looked at him. “If it would be agreeable to you,” he added a little awkwardly. She raised a challenging eyebrow and rose to move the table into place, suppressing a smile. 

The little house was desolate and strange, but it was a fortress against the night and the things that moved in it. The wind keened outside - some oddity of the hills and the lay of the land sent gusts to smash against the north wall - but it was warm by the fire and Leonie felt a sense of companionship with the man opposite her. The firelight warmed and softened his face, but his eyes were keen and cool as he watched the board. If it were her, she would be lonely here. An empty house, and emptier for having once been full. She reached for her rook, and Cabal sat forward, his move ready. 

They were silent over the game, but waves of anticipation, chagrin, gloating, and quiet calculation filled the room like the heat from the fire. Cabal captured the rook, of course.

Just then, a knock came at the door. “Is that your bridge club?” Cabal grimaced as if he suspected who it might be and performed the lengthy procedure of unbarring his door. The police sergeant she had seen exiting the village pub strode in. 

“What the hell are you playing at? The village is like a hornet’s next this evening. Half of them want to break out the pitchforks and free the girl, and the other half want to have both of you arrested on immorality charges.” Then, addressing himself to Leonie, “I don’t know what you’re doing here, miss, but I suggest you leave. He’s a bad lot, and if I come back to the village without you, they’ll know you’re no better than you should be, pardon my saying it.”

They were in the parlour. Leonie lowered herself into Cabal’s chair wearily, favouring her arm. "For pity's sake. Am I going to have to dodge pitchforks on the way back to the train station?”

Cabal sneered. “Settle them down, Parkin. What do I pay you for?”

Leonie’s eyes rounded. “ _Pay_ him?’ The two men looked at her. "Oh, well, yes. Sorry.” 

“Mr. Cabal,’ said Parkin, with a hard look at him, “is a generous supporter of the police benevolent fund.” Leonie nodded warmly, trying to cover her gaffe. But police constables taking bribes!

Cabal looked heavenward and dropped into the other chair. “In any case, this is not a social call.”

“It’s business, then?” said Parkin, with a frankly disbelieving look at Leonie. There are, of course, female necromancers; there are even blonde, blue-eyed female necromancers under the age of forty, but Parkin had never heard of any. To be fair, the demographic did largely run to grizzle-bearded men. He looked at her searchingly.

Cabal interpreted the comment and look rather differently and went frosty. “Miss Barrow is under threat.” 

“I am,’ said Leonie, uncertain whether to laugh or be angry, “a university student, P.C. Parkin. Only a university student. I’m not sure which colourful profession you were implying, but both are incorrect.” It was Parkin’s turn to be taken aback and nod warmly, as if no alternative had ever been considered. But he looked suspicious.

“And I’ll thank you to control the mood in the village and leave my- me alone.” Cabal pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘My affairs’ would have been entirely too freighted. How had this happened, any of it. One minute a man had a soul, and the next he was sheltering waifs and fending off interest in his personal life from an entire village of murderous Englishmen.

“Well, you know your own business. But I’d advise you to break this little party up so the village can pretend it never happened, Mr. Cabal. And you, Miss Barrow, if your father was here…”

A muffled “ye gods” came from the fireside.

“…I’m sure he’d tell you to get back to your university and mind your own.”

Leonie’s patience had finally run out. She was sorely tempted to tell Parkin what Detective Inspector Frank Barrow would have to say about policemen being on the take from necromancers, but that would have opened up several new avenues of inquiry which she was reluctant to address. She put on her best university accent. “Do you have any further advice to dispense, P.C. Parkin?”

Parkin drew himself up, his belt creaking. “Not at present, young lady.”

“Then perhaps you will permit us to return to our conversation. Mr. Cabal and I have much to discuss.” 

The door slammed and Cabal sipped his coffee contentedly. Perhaps this uncomfortable experience did have some compensations, he thought.

“What have you done to the villagers? They loathe you."

“Nothing. Nothing much. I don't trouble them unnecessarily. There will, even with the strictest precautions, be some accidents. And I like to be left alone.”

“Do they know what you are? I mean, what you do?”

“I doubt it. Not exactly. But they fear me." 

“Does that bother you?” Leonie asked, absentmindedly rubbing her arm. 

“Why would it?” 

“Never mind, Cabal. I’m exhausted. Sleep tight."


	4. In which an allergy manifests

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy fanworks day! Cabal experiments; Leonie tries to sleep.

Leonie heard him climbing the stairs to his attic laboratory shortly after he bade her good night. His step was light and eager on the stair.

In the lab Cabal tended his own experiments. He felt refreshed and thought he might do without sleep. He filled the boiling flask with a grey, cloudy liquid, and his mind wandered as his hands worked. Having someone in the house was distracting, terribly so. He had gone for his revolver half a dozen times over the day before remembering the unfamiliar sounds must be Leonie. Leonie, walking around and looking at things and _wondering,_ which was nearly as distracting as a mob. He thought she would not pry, but she could hardly blindfold herself and deactivate her brain. Well... but no. 

It had truly been the only solution at hand. There were safer places, but none where she would be tolerated. Twiccian’s methods were hit and miss, but he was hitting closer. 

He adjusted the flame under the flask and watched the distillate accumulate. But it had not been unpleasant to have someone to talk to, play against. Her chess game was a disaster, of course, but that was a question of inexperience and ignorance, not ineptitude. It had still been a game, and once or twice he had seen flickers of strategy and wit. Perhaps he would invite Parkin over, so he and Leonie could continue their discussion. 

He frowned at his logbook and disciplined his thoughts. He did not live for pleasure. He didn’t dig up bodies and steal books and traipse up and down to Hell because it gave him joy, but because it was necessary. This work calmed him after the day’s annoyances, reassuring him that he was inching toward the discovery of the right process, the best catalyst. 

He hadn’t planned to use the distillate tonight, but he was awake, and he wanted to see the results. The base mixture, the heating, the agitation, boiling off the carrying solution - and voila, a new test batch. He could do the preliminary test. He threw the spark generator’s knife switch. Blood. Life. 

And, predictably, it failed in a semi-promising but entirely inconvenient way. He stood over the little smear, breathing hard and wondering if Miss Barrow had been asleep before all that. Miss Barrow. He fetched a mop and dustpan from their closet in the lab. He had been satisfied with the letters, the game carried on by post with occasional verbal jabs from Leonie. That was concession enough. He heard a sound from below and automatically reached for the Webley before pulling his hand back. Again.

Soon the laboratory was dark, the flasks were cool, and he had written out his notes. He descended the stairs and passed the door of the room that used to be his. Horst’s was hosting an animate skeleton at the moment. Every bed was full in this happy little household, he thought wryly. 

But Leonie was not sleeping the sleep of the innocent (of which he had heard so much). The light was off, but he heard strange, mumbled speech. With a disregard for propriety that would have confirmed the second-worst suspicions of the village, he knocked on her door. In the silence that followed, he asked a question which the villagers would have found deeply perplexing, not to say disappointing: “would you like some cocoa, Miss Barrow?"

...

Leonie had tossed and turned in the narrow bed. Her arm felt hot and painful. She must have strained something when she had that little tiff with the skeletons. She wished she had brought aspirin, but bearding the lion in his laboratory didn’t seem like a pleasant idea. Lion. She was the lion, of course, not Cabal. Overhead there was a rasping groan and a series of sharp thuds. Cabal’s voice was raised in anger and there was a rattling noise against the floorboards and a sort of hum that dwindled away. Something violent and strange was happening above her head. The borrowed room was remote and there was a rushing in her ears which half-hid threatening sounds. 

Some time later, her door opened.

His face was ebony and gold in the dim light from the candle. His eyes were black voids, in which stars drifted and things writhed. He stepped to her bedside and she made a disorganized sort of cry, but the figure only put a cool hand on her forehead, grunted, and departed. He returned and lit the lamp on the night table. The necromancer, she recognized him now, said something, but she couldn’t follow the words. She was frightened again, but she couldn’t keep her attention on it, and the emotion slid and drifted as the room turned lazily. 

...

She awoke wondering if she had missed her alarm. But she was sick, wasn’t she? She opened her eyes on an unfamiliar ceiling, spiderwebbed but lit with sunshine. Her nightgown was neatly rolled up over her elbow and the soft sleeve-shaped bandage she wore under her clothing had been removed. The limb was red and swollen, and the dots of scar tissue were livid on the skin. 

On the night table by the lamp was a pipette, a syringe, her sleeve-bandage (also neatly folded), and a small plate holding a damp face flannel. Cabal manifested in the open door, in a cardigan. She wondered if she had dreamed the sinister figure from last night and the noises from above. 

“You’re out of uniform,” she remarked mildly. 

He frowned and shifted his weight to his other foot. “Miss Barrow, are you aware of where you are?” 

“In your house. Your family’s house. Near the village of…."

“So you are coherent. Though fixating on irrelevant details."

“Do you own a bathing costume?"

“Miss Barrow?” A trace of irritation, this time.

“You possess tartan slippers. And a cardigan. Apparently anything is possible. If you’re wearing tartan, you might also own a tank suit.’ When he didn’t reply, she added "I feel dreadful."

“Had your arm bothered you before?"

“It’s been slow to heal, I suppose? I don’t have much basis for comparison. I think I strained it yesterday, bashing up those skeletons.” She frowned as she said it, feeling she was forgetting something.

Cabal smiled coldly at the bedraggled figure. “No good deed goes unpunished, Miss Barrow. When you tore that being out of your arm, it seems it left something behind. I believe you have some sort of demon residue in you, and it is being inflamed by my house’s wards."

She took that in. “That’s absolutely disgusting.” She considered her pink arm. “I really should have let that thing eat you."

“Very likely.” 

“It’s been aching like hell, but as I said, I just thought I’d strained it." She looked thoughtful. "I had peculiar dreams. Sounds from upstairs, late last night."

“When I left my lab I found you delirious and fevered. I examined your arm, and it was obviously the source of your condition."

“What did you give me?” She nodded at the syringe.

“Holy water, administered by pipette. The injection was an anti-inflammatory, to bring down the fever and swelling, but it’s the holy water that has bought you some time.”

"Holy water is effective? Doesn't that mean..."

"Not the way you think. To return to the point, you can manage your symptoms with holy water, but I have only a limited supply. Here is your morning dose, by the way.” He handed her a teacup.

“You made tea with holy water?"

“Five cc added to the cup. Drink up.” She did. It tasted like Assam with lemon. 

“Cabal. Did I say anything while delirious?"

“It was mostly unintelligible. I believe there was something about goblins.” 

***

He spent the rest of the morning in his lab. In the afternoon he arrived with sandwiches and a chessboard. Leonie tried not to look as if all her prayers had been answered.

"The test batch... The mixture must settle. There is no harm in some distraction in the meantime."

"I wouldn't think so." Cabal set up a new game, and battle was rapidly joined. The fight was vicious, but inevitably one-sided. Leonie's last-ditch defence rallied around her king, trying to pick off Cabal's disciplined regiments in unpredictable sorties, but the methodical, merciless attrition told against her at last, and her king was cut down. He seemed satisfied by the win and reset the board. 

“Saints preserve me from your bishops, Cabal.” 

“I could spot you a piece.” He looked amused by the idea. 

“No! Or not yet. I’ll get slaughtered fair and square a few more times before I succumb. Dear god, how long have you been playing?”

“My mother taught me; I played with my brother in my youth.” Leonie tried to formulate a response, but got caught up in tenses. They must be/have been were/are excellent players. "She taught me in this room," he added absently, looking around it. "I was sick." 

When she got up to use the w.c. she felt almost normal, except for her aching arm. Cabal had averted his eyes when she left the bed covers - she couldn't decide if this was one of Cabal's flashes of prim good manners, or if it was another slur on her warm and comfortable nightwear. "I bet he doesn't sleep in itchy lace and constricting slips.” She shook her head. She must still be delirious. Perhaps she could blame her losing streak on it, too.

Their first game-by-letter had been short and brutal; he had massacred her. She had played a little over the years, but Cabal must have played rather more, and she suspected his turn of mind was very well adapted to the ten-turns-ahead multiplicity required of the excellent player.

She was not as good as he, but neither was she a quitter. The day after her abject and total defeat she had defiantly sent an opening move to his numbered post office box: the first link in whatever Great Silk Road of steps and stops Cabal had devised for his mail security. Then she had taken a book on chess out of the campus library.

Back in the sunny room, Leonie rearranged her covers. “May I ask you a question, Cabal?"

She had her answer in the way he eased his right foot off the rung of his chair to the floor and shifted. “You may ask."

"A professional one." He relaxed minutely. "What do you actually do? Necromantically, that is." 

He looked surprised, but answered. "I read and write. I design and carry out experiments that will teach me of the forces I am trying to manipulate. From time to time I must personally source reference works and materials."

Which told her nothing, really. "And you'll kill to get them?"

He replied coolly. "I certainly have done so. Why, Miss Barrow? Are you compiling your statement to the police?" And he smiled.

"Stop that. It doesn't scare me any more, and you're trying to distract me."

"I fail to see the direction your questions are taking, then," he said, dropping the intimidation for a direct assessing look that was, in truth, more frightening. 

“Have you ever thought of giving it up entirely?"

“Of course. I will give it up after I succeed."

“What does that mean?"

He shrugged irritably and did not meet her eyes. "I fail to understand where these questions are tending. Excuse me." And he left, cardigan still over the back of the chair.


	5. In which introductions are made

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our happy little house party is crashed by the wandering undead. And that's the least of it.

He closed the hidden door to the basement lab and looked around the harshly lit space.  He had several experiments running but nothing that was much disturbed by a few days’ neglect.  He settled down at a small desk to work on one of them, soothed by the tediousness of the task.  

Time passed.  As he shuffled the deck he recognized, in a rare moment of insight, that he was hiding.  Instinctive, but foolish.  If Miss Barrow wobbled downstairs she would not find him, but she might form some suspicions about the lower level of the house.  He should go back.  He should work on their annoying little problem and get her out of the house before he ran out of holy water and the resulting fever cooked her brain.  Miss Barrow was admirable in many ways - but in this house she was grit in the instrument, a crack in the lens.  

His conscience, which had been so irrationally insistent upon her survival, was quiet.  His soul, which had warmed him on the train to the university town, had subsided back into torpor, having gotten him into trouble again.  He remembered the soiled, tattered scrap Satan had flung at him in Hell’s audience room.  Since then he had given his soul as little thought as possible; it was another resource to be applied, wasn’t it?  He wasn’t trying to mend it; he would attend to that later if it became relevant.  But like a child it made demands and fussed over trifles and whined in the night if it wasn’t attended to.  The situation could have been worse, he supposed.  It could have been… well, any living individual other than Miss Barrow.

He stood from his desk, automatically smoothing his trousers.  He never needed reminding, but down here, he felt safer.  Purposeful. He felt a sudden need to see her face. He resisted.  He tried not to do it too often; it would eventually leave tell-tale marks on the floor and pulley.  Moreover, he feared losing his memories of her, alive, to the pale face in the glass coffin; she hadn't been ethereal and remote, but lively, driven, laughing.  But sometimes he did it anyway.  He pushed the mortuary slab aside.

Every time he did this was important.  The camouflage, the forces at play were delicate.  A man of many habits, this was his one ritual.  He rolled the operating table to the side and moved the surgical lamp with care.

He had raised the slab clear of the floor when he felt the house wards go. A pop like a soap bubble, a splash of energies released into the void, and for a moment he was as white as she.  Twiccian must be here.  

A secondary set of wards still held here, in the cellar laboratory, but the first floor, where Leonie slept...  There was no time to lower the slab safely.  The camouflage was excellent.  The door was strong.  His presence would make little difference if Twiccian somehow made entry. _Scheisse_.  He wavered for a moment, then cursing, left the lab.  He hid the entrance meticulously, then took the stairs two at a time.  

***

Leonie was awoken from a fitful nap by the tic-tic of bone on hardwood.  In her dreams a skeletal army had invaded her home, reaching for her with bony fingers.  She had felt oddly fearless but stifled: hemmed in and compressed. 

She had awoken to a reality that was not so different.  Bony feet climbed the stairs, and pale domed skulls gleamed in the twilight as she slammed the door.  Predictably, there was a deadbolt.

Her eyes searched the sparsely furnished room.  Damn it. Not a field hockey stick or cricket bat in sight.  Then she pictured Cabal, at any age, participating in a team sport and abandoned the thought.  Bones scraped against the wood of the door.  There was little danger of them breaking it down, but they might be able to keep her penned in.  She wondered where they had found Johannes and how he was faring.  And perhaps it was her imagination, but she felt warm.  Like all English houses the Cabal residence tended towards a bracing coolness; despite the weather she was sweating, and her arm felt warm to the touch.

She heard the measured tread of shoes on the stairs followed by a somehow methodical series of crashes and thuds.  Help, it seemed, was on the way.  She opened the door when all was silent to see Cabal smoothing his hair, which had likely been disarranged by a flailing bony arm.  “Why don’t you use the gun?"

“The wallpaper.  Hurry.”  And before she could retrieve a housecoat Cabal was towing her down the stairs, through the main floor, into the kitchen, and down into the forbidden cellar.  She was disappointed; it was bare, except for a few boxes and bits of lumber. She was disappointed until the barren storage rooms disclosed a secret door, which opened into a spacious laboratory.  Until she saw the zombie in the laboratory’s corner. 

It was obviously, self-evidently, dead.  It had been a middle-aged woman but was now a grey-faced blue-lipped horror sitting apathetically in the corner.  Leonie walked backward as quickly as she could, but Cabal intercepted her, closing the door, barring it, and momentarily distracting her by drawing on it in his own blood and uttering a coughing, rasping phrase.

Leonie returned her gaze fearfully to the zombie.  It was wearing a somber dress.  It was chained up, and just out of its reach there was a small desk holding an electric light, a notebook, and a series of flash cards.  How like Cabal, to sit out of arm’s reach of a horror and show it flash cards.  Leonie couldn’t look at it.  That had been a person, maybe a person with a job or a family.  She had brushed that straggly brown hair every morning, and now her corpse was chained up in Cabal’s basement.  He had made a person’s body into that… abominable thing that was looking absently at the ceiling light while her fingers twitched.  

She shuddered deeply, utterly revolted.  Cabal was hastening towards the zombie with a tarpaulin.  “Stop!"  Cabal turned back to her, looking - uncertain?  He stood between her and the zombie, as if he were protecting it - or trying to hide it.  "You can’t just throw a tarp over her as if she’s a… an old bicycle or something."

“It is barely able to distinguish between light and dark,” he said, trying not to hold the tarp up to hide the indisputable evidence from Leonie.

“It?  She’s wearing a dress, Cabal."

“It, Miss Barrow, is experimental material.  I have been trying to determine the limits of its sentience.  It is peaceful in nature and decomposition has slowed dramatically, but she is barely smarter than a houseplant.  It is another failure, but the results are still scientifically valuable."

“You said she."

“A biological distinction only.  And one rendered moot by her current state.”  He had known having a shambling undead and Miss Barrow on his hands at the same time was a bad idea.

"It’s revolting, what you’ve done to her.  I don’t care what your reason is, it’s disgusting.”  His head shifted back - just a fraction.  His irritable expression was tempered by… something?  Well, that was just too bloody bad.  This wasn’t tinkering with test tubes and lab rats, this was… could her soul be in there?  In some way?

She had eaten dinner roughly above where the zombie sat on the cold tile.  She felt ill.  She had known, of course,  that he was a necromancer.  She had seen him raise a corpse to something that was almost life.  But she had allowed herself to forget that.  She had felt an odd kinship for this chess-playing communicative almost-companianable Cabal.  She suddenly felt certain that the noises she had heard from the attic in the night were real and not a product of fever dreams or paranoia.  

Cabal had overcome his moment of... whatever that had been, turned dismissively, and swathed the zombie in a tarpaulin, tidily, as he did everything. 

She turned her back on the scene; they had more immediate problems, after all.  She looked unhappily at the operating table and crossed her arms; she wished she’d managed to bring the housecoat.  She couldn’t bring herself to sit at the desk overlooking the scene, and she badly felt the need to sit down somewhere.  The tiled floor was clean but cold, and she leaned back against a lab bench.  She was ill and revolted and she shivered.  A click of metal on metal and a swish of fabric next to her attracted her attention; a lab coat had been hung from the bench’s water tap.  She stood and put it on over her nightgown.  Cabal had moved to the far end of the lab and was standing, face turned ostentatiously aside, his arms crossed.

“Did it ever occur to you, Cabal, that you don’t have to do all of… this?”  She heard the acid frustration in her voice.  “You could have become the kind of scientist who doesn’t violate graves and keep zombies in his home.  I doubt anyone held a gun to your head.  What the.. the _hell_ are you doing with your life."

He turned to look at her.  “Shut up, Miss Barrow.  And, as Parkin so excellently suggested, _'mind your own.’_ I am terribly sorry if my life’s work distresses you, and if you would rather keep company with Twiccian’s undead servitors, the door is there.  Thank you so much for the visit.”  

“Don’t be fatuous, Cabal." She felt vile.  Sweaty and chilled and miserable.  She sat down again.  'You can’t help one person and pat yourself on the back for being a good boy.  Not if you’re raising people from the dead and chaining them up in your basement.”  

She waited, but no answer came.  She noticed that the dreadfully suggestive operating table was wheeled against the wall.  She could imagine him standing over it, lab coated and peoccupied, dragging the dead back to life for dreadful, brief times, then writing his notes and planning to do it better next time, and the next. Then she realized that next to it, what she’d taken for a oddly placed stone bench was, in fact, a broad stone slab suspended just clear of the floor.  Between the slab and the floor she could see nothing but a narrow line of darkness.  Not looking away, she raised her voice.  “Cabal.  What else do you have down here?"

He had circled to her side of the lab bench.  He saw where she was looking and she had the impression of stifled movement, as if he had quickly repressed an urge to move towards the block and tackle - or towards her.  He went very still.  “Cabal.  Show me what else you have down there."

“It is not your concern."

“The devil it isn’t.”  Her voice had come out loud and uneven, on the edge of hysteria.  If she was trapped down here with him and with the zombie, and with whatever was in that… that oubliette, she had to know the worst at once.  

She started to push the stone back on the rail; it was surprisingly light.  Cabal was there in a moment, his hand tight on her wrist.  She looked up at his face, expecting to see anger, even violence.  His face was not, in fact, particularly expressive even now, but she could see the desperation under the surface.  His grip hurt.

Neither of them knew who stepped back first.  There was a silent apology in the abruptness with which they turned away.  The moment extended.  Cabal took hold of the raised block, and Leonie expected him to replace it, but, instead he pulled it aside with a practiced care.   Leonie could see nothing but darkness in the coffin-shaped hole; the surgical light which must usually disguise the block and tackle cast a sharp oblique light.  His back still to her, Cabal knelt, paused for a moment, reached below the lip, and flicked a switch.  She wondered what aberration Cabal might keep in this furthest and securest part of the safest place he knew - but his manner confused her. 

Not very far below the floor, Leonie saw a thick pane of glass: and below that, a young woman, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old.  She lay suspended in a clear liquid that seemed to sharpen the light instead of diffusing it.  Her yellow-blonde hair hung in a cloud of suspended ripples and curls.  She was pale to translucency, her hands loose at her sides.  The light was beautiful.  

"Oh, Johannes," whispered Leonie, her throat tight.  "What happened?"

He looked steadily down.  "She drowned."  And he sounded like he couldn't quite believe it, even now.

They knelt at the edge together, looking down.  An observer might have seen her lay her hand on his - and him permit it.

...

Some time later, the block set into the floor once more, Cabal and Leonie sat at the desk.  "Should we be concerned that your house is filled with with uninvited undead?”  She looked askance at the rustling tarpaulin.

“Something disrupted the outer wards.  There is a secondary system of defences here, but they will not hold."

“So we are to be poked to death by skeletons?"

“Of course not.  But Twiccian may be here.  Or somehow he has focussed enough power through an intermediary to take down my wards."

Cabal was staring at the operating table, now wheeled back into position on the false floor.  Leonie followed his train of thought.  They would be found, eventually.  The door would be forced and the wards extinguished.  They would be killed and the house searched at leisure for knowledge and items of value. They would find her body.  Twiccian, curious, would study her. Perhaps she would shamble, empty-eyed, around his lair until the heat death of the universe. 

“Johannes.”  He ignored her; she could see the wheels turning.  “There’s no particular reason we should wait here for them, is there?"

“No.”  He exhaled.  “I would rather we didn’t.  Among other concerns, my holy water supply is kept in the attic.  Your last dose was some hours ago.  Our position will weaken with time.”  

“A plan, first?"

“Do you have one?  At present, I do not.  I suspect, Miss Barrow, that I have not been a very good host."

“Take heart, Cabal.  You were a worse guest.’  She smiled.  'Where there’s life, there’s hope, I suppose."

“There is always hope,” he said with an air of finality.

***

A short time later the skeletons milling around the basement had a rude shock.  They were just sentient enough to recognize doors as those things with knobs on them and victims on the far side - and windows as those things one could see through and which also provided access to victims.  Imagine their surprise when a heretofore innocent stretch of wall emitted two well-armed individuals with an insufficient respect for the dead.


	6. In which a confrontation occurs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cabal and Leonie confront Twiccian's forces.

Some of the skeletons on the main floor were dry and bare, and some bore wet smears of mud which attested to their local origins. Cabal cursed. He would have to make himself very scarce in the village. 

The skeletons seemed to have no particular aim until they saw the living. They bumped into furniture or stared absently at the swinging of a pendulum, but they had the advantage of numbers, and the sight of Cabal and Leonie emerging from the cellar soon galvanized them to action. Leonie was cornered at one point, bony fingers gripping her tightly as if to bear her away or tear her apart, but Cabal spared a moment from his own victims to bash helpful holes in hers.

She felt a pardonable pride as she shook the bone flakes from her hair. Cabal was still dispatching a brace of invaders in the front hall, his lips pursed against the chips that flew from the dry bones. She stifled an odd swell of affection as he booted the shattered skull of one of his attackers petulantly against the wall. “Do you have any idea how much sweeping there will be?” he snarled, apparently addressing the skull. They had a final whispered conference and exited the house.

The sky outside was a black bowl of stars clapped over the valley, the village not even a glow on the horizon. The night was moonless and Leonie was reminded again how dark night was in the country. She had known something near to it as a little girl, when her mother had taken her outside in the damp cold to lie on a blanket and trace constellations in the sky. The flagstones were cold under her toes.

Cabal’s eyes were turned not to the stars but to the horizon, where a ring of robed figures encircled his valley. Whatever they were, they awaited the results of the skeletons’ search. Cabal stared but could not identify them or tell if Twiccian were among them. He felt exposed without the wards - a chilly senation of nudity, like stepping out of bed on a winter’s morning.

“Mister Twiccian.” Leonie’s voice carried in the shallow dish of the hills. “I wish to inform you that you are risking exposure by attacking us.” There was a minor commotion among the figures at one end of the valley. Leonie turned to face them. Could Twiccian be here himself? 

“You are aware that Mr. Cabal and I were in a position to learn a great deal about you during our recent visit to your facilities. You are naturally concerned that we will share this information with your enemies," said Leonie, praying that their shallow little stratagem played on Twiccian’s mania in precisely the right way. 

“You are my enemies!” came a rasping voice from the hillside. It was not Twiccian’s, but the cadence, the fear were his.

“We are not.”

“You lie! You are my rivals, my enemies. You have learned too much, and now you must dieeeeee."

Bloody hell. “Yes. Yes, fine, we are your enemies. I want you incarcerated so I can study you, and Cabal naturally fears you and wants your research. Do you agree?"

“Yesss….” Twiccian was oddly mollified, though still on the edge of hysteria.

“But we are also frightened of you. We will not approach you again until we are stronger. You are far more powerful than we, so our only defence is your exposure. If either of us dies or goes missing, information on you will be released to the general public - including, of course, to the police and other necromancers."

“You’ve read my files. You’re trying to manipulate me!"

“Of course we’re trying to manipulate you.” Leonie’s voice was frosted with contempt. “But I’m not lying."

Leonie felt a sudden, painful pressure behind her eyes. It was like a sinus headache at the pressure of a car tyre. With the pressure came another mind, pressing and stifling and squeezing her self aside. It was nauseatingly wrong, and the scratchy, agitated, malevolent feel of the intruder told her it was Twiccian. She instinctively pushed back, and the pressure increased twofold. She braced herself against the back of her skull, fending off the intruder. 

Opening her eyes, Cabal had a tension in his shoulders and hands. She risked diverting a shred of attention. “Cabal.” 

Cabal was focussing his attention on his mental defences. They were very good defences, slippery and hard and soundproof. Twiccian’s attack prodded and bounced but failed to make even the slightest chip on their surface. Cabal held them carefully, waiting for a further attack. Leonie said his name. “Yes?"

“What do I do?"

He heard the strain in her voice. “Since you are still there, continue what you’re doing, Miss Barrow. Evidently this was a ploy to draw us into the open. We are currently encountering Twiccian’s main attack."

“I’m losing.” She sounded frightened.

“Then do it better."

“Johannes!"

“I do not have the focus or the time to teach you mental shielding just now. Consider this a practical class. Exclude him.” He waited, but she was silent. Just as well. Twiccian was still pressing and fluttering at his defences. Of course, if either of them gave way, Twiccian would see their bluff and annihilate them both. He hoped Leonie could hold.

That bastard, she thought, not bothering to differentiate between Cabal and Twiccian. The pain and pressure were terrible, beyond migraine, beyond anything she’d felt. She wondered if actual physical damage had resulted. She was losing ground, squeezed smaller and smaller until she felt like a little fist balled up in the back of her head. 

And what about Twiccian, anyway? Why did she care about him? And what did she know about his motives and his plans? The thought sprung up among her own like a tall weed, an itchy curiosity that begged to be addressed. She knew instinctively it was not from her own mind. She thought very, very hard about the first thing that came into her mind; her father’s fishing trips. She thought about her father’s creel, his brown plaid fishing jacket, the scales stuck to his trousers when he came home, the bony little fish of which he was so proud.

The pressure increased until she wondered if something in her head had burst, something she might want later. She felt a sudden flare of irritation. Wasn’t this just typical? This was like being crowded in a church pew or having her question cut off in seminar. She remembered Twiccian’s darting eyes and sidelong glances as she felt his mind pressing against her, forcing her out of her own brain. Her own brain, mind you, the one she was born with. And some crypt-dwelling, bug-eyed, sawn-off excuse for a human being was invading it, elbowing her into a corner like that man on the commuter bus last week. With the difference that this might, she guessed, be fatal.

She was out of her depth: an undergraduate caught up in the business of necromancers. Cabal couldn’t be in this same spot, balled up into a corner of his head. Then perhaps… pretend she was Cabal? She would wager he wasn’t crushed up in a tiny corner of his brain. He was determined, he was skilled, but there was also a total commitment that steeled him against the risk of failure. She had an inkling of why that was, and she didn’t have anything quite like it, but she thought hard about her dad and about all the plans she’d made that didn’t involve dying in a necromancer’s front garden wearing a nightgown and a lab coat.

The pain and pressure increased as she held her ground, but it was increasing anyway, so there was nothing to fear there. She wouldn’t be feeling anything at all soon if this kept up. Why not ruin a few blood vessels before Twiccian moved in? Her anger spiked. She mentally put her shoulder against the pressure and pushed. New alien thoughts sprung up quickly suggesting that it would be over soon, and that she just had to answer one thing and he’d leave, that Cabal was the real threat, that she could go, of course. Of course. 

Leonie bared her teeth in the dark, pressing him out of every contusion and neuron. “You sleazy little degenerate,” she hissed inside her mind. "Get out or I’ll crush you here.” Twiccian’s presence slipped out of her mind like a fish sliding between a fisherman’s hands. 

“And stay out!” Leonie bawled at the horizon. 

To Cabal’s surprise, the robed figures dropped to the ground like abandoned marionettes.

 

***

Leonie sat by the fire, her feet propped up towards the blaze. The lab coat was abandoned over an unloved-looking settee, and she was wrapped in a housecoat of green velour with gold satin piping; it went around her twice. She guessed it had not originally belonged to Johannes.

After Twiccian’s withdrawal she had sat down on the walk outside and felt very uninclined to stand up. Cabal had tried sarcasm, mockery, and logic, to no avail. Leonie had experienced a disturbed night, several emotional shocks, an ongoing metaphysical allergy, some brisk exercise with the skeletons, and Twiccian’s mental assault, and the thought of a nice little nap here in the garden was very pleasant. Cabal didn’t seem to be feeling at the top of his form either. He had embarked upon an unbroken tirade of polyglot curses, kicked his coat through the open door, and hoisted Leonie over his shoulder like a side of pork. She was just conscious enough to feel like the most unutterable idiot. She was dropped into her chair, a hypodermic was jabbed into her upper arm with more efficiency than care, (“OW, you bastard”) and her fingers were crushed around a liqueur glass of stale water. He withdrew up the stairs again. She focussed on not retching all over the hearthrug.

The master of the house returned with the robe, a plaster saint tucked under his arm, a bottle of rum, a startled black cockerel, and a rosary swinging from his trouser pocket. The door slammed. Leonie arranged the robe over herself, sipped her holy water, and listened to the faint sound of chanting.

He returned perhaps half an hour later, sans cockerel, statue, and most of the bottle of rum. He did not speak but heaved himself upstairs, and Leonie heard water running. He returned in his shirtsleeves, freshly towelled and a little damp. His nails were very clean, and there was a fleck of blood on his collar. He dropped into his chair.

“Tomorrow I will have to round up the fairies before they chance on a cow or a tourist. I am in no mood to discuss that with Inspector Parkin. We are safe for the night, at least. I have instituted temporary measures."

“Where did the cockerel go?"

He shook his head slowly, as if pained. “Please, Miss Barrow."

“What will you do with the things he put around the house?” She sat up to test her balance. The room was stationary, so she stood slowly, put on the robe, and went to pour herself something stronger than holy water from the tantalus on the side table.

“Simply zombies. An afternoon with a wheelbarrow, and then into the furnace. The roses like the ash, at least.” The roses were particularly lush. Cabal grimaced, stretched out his legs towards the fire, and noticed that a glass of brandy had appeared by his elbow. "I wouldn’t be surprised to see a cull of lawyers in our respective areas,” he added. He did not sound as if he particularly regretted the idea.

Leonie felt a qualm. She sat, arranged her robe, and sipped her brandy. “I hadn’t thought of that."

“Silver linings."

“Try to be a little less revolting, Cabal."

“Finish your holy water, Miss Barrow.” 

The fire crackled in the hearth. Leonie moved a piece on the chessboard that still sat between them. Battle was joined once more.

She was putting up a spirited defence, but Cabal’s bishops had been unsettlingly quiet. She suspected he was maneuvering while she amused herself with a few sacrificial pieces. “Twiccian. He’ll withdraw, plot, and attack from hiding again, won’t he."

“Yes.” 

“Do you think he’ll try something more practical next time?"

“He has a horror of betrayal. We’re likely safe from mercenaries and assassins.” The silence stretched as Cabal considered what else Twiccian might send. It stretched past a pause into a definite lull. He turned from the chessboard and stretched in his chair again. 

"Cabal, the woman. The girl below the floor."

Leonie hadn’t spoken until now because she knew it might bring the evening to an end, perhaps unpleasantly. She wasn’t sure why he had shown her the body at the root of the house, but she doubted he welcomed conversation on the topic. She held her breath and looked only at the fire. 

After several second, she risked a look. Cabal was sitting as he had been, legs stretched, lying low in his chair, his head sunk to his chest. perhaps he was asleep.

“You wouldn’t turn her into that, Johannes. That thing in the corner."

Perhaps it was her imagination, but the silence seemed suddenly charged. 

She waited. The tension faded, slowly. She had decided to go to bed, when, from the depths of his chair, he spoke. "I will get her out. Not this year. I suspect. Perhaps not the next. But I will do whatever is required.” 

Leonie said nothing.

Then, reluctantly, "almost anything. I wouldn’t destroy the world. Or give up my soul. Now.’ He tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling. “I’m not even sure about murder, actually. I mean, murder in the first degree. But surely some ends justify almost any means; murder is a mere…” he searched for a word with which to describe the triviality of murder next to his ambitions, “… bagatelle, compared to true resurrection. I think you accused me of playing hero, earlier. I have no such aspirations. But I am…” he groped for words again “...concerned. I wonder if I can still act as required to achieve my goal.” He stared at the fire. His voice lowered. "But soulless, I would also have failed. Or worse."

Leonie had nothing to say to that. She tipped over her king, conceding the game, and picked up the skirts of her robe, leaving Cabal still watching the fire and apparently oblivious to her retreat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may have noticed, an epilogue or final chapter will follow. Thank you for reading!


	7. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cabal and Leonie go their separate ways.

A discombobulated Detective Inspector Parkin showed Cabal’s girl into his office. He hid yesterday's tea mug behind his lamp while he sized her up. Her distinctive hair was rolled up under a hat, perhaps for travelling, though she’d no suitcase with her. Her smart city coat matched the hat. Her boots had been bought for country roads and were several years older. Perhaps she was what she said. More fool her, then. 

The woman sat down in the chair across from his desk and asked, without preamble, “is it simply the money?"

He watched her as he collected his thoughts. "The money doesn't hurt any. But…” He wondered if she’d laugh. “He couldn't rest easy without thinking he had me in his pocket. It makes him quieter. I was telling you the truth when I said he's a bad lot and you'd best keep away: but I’d also say he's no worse than some down at the pub. Perhaps that doesn't speak highly of our locals. But the widows and orphans fund doesn't care where his cash comes from, and he hasn't killed any husbands or fathers on my patch."

He sighed and leaned back in his desk chair. "I'm sorry for him, truth be told. I don't know where he's come from, but a man his age should have a family. Still, he's an unpleasant bastard, so perhaps it's as well."

He looked at her squarely. “I’ll have to cover myself if you’re planning to turn him in. There'd be an enquiry coming,” but then half-smiled at her, without warmth. “But if you were turning him in, you’d not be here. I sleep well, girl, but I have a tough old conscience. Thick calluses. Comes with the job. I wouldn’t be surprised if yours started to rub. But keep it away from me." 

***

There was a morning train. A short conference had established that Leonie was not disposed to linger, and Cabal did not press her to stay. The day had dawned clear, and the golden early sunlight diffused in the sharp air, lending the spring morning a soft, dreamy quality. The dewy garden was quiet, as if sleeping or frightened.

The distance from the village seemed shorter than it had two days before, and the train station appeared between the hills like the promise of waking from a long and bizarre dream. 

Cabal was dressed as himself once more. He had been quiet, absent. Leonie imagined that his attention had returned to the laboratory and a new series of experiments. He spoke. “Be careful with your arm. The inflammation. I would avoid lengthy church services."

“Is there anything to be done about it?"

“I don’t know. It may fade in time, and I can recommend a supplier of holy water, if you need one. You might consider carrying a flask. It is the least of your worries. You will need to consider how you will avoid Twiccian’s attention."

“If the residence matron finds the flask during one of her snooping sessions, you won’t be saying that.” But she, too, was wondering what their next step would be. Twiccian was clever and powerful, though hampered by his madness, and he wouldn’t allow them to live indefinitely; it must be gnawing at him that they were walking in the spring sunshine. Good. She hoped it kept him up at night. 

As they entered the village something caught Leonie’s attention. “Wait here a moment, if you don’t mind. I’ll not be long.” She walked purposefully towards Parkin, who she had caught unlocking the police station. Parkin looked startled, but there was nowhere to hide. Cabal could empathise.

***

She returned from her interview with a slower step, puzzling out what Parkin had said. There was a brutal pragmatism to it that she found troubling.

Word of their arrival must have spread because not only was the platform deserted, but the ticket booth had been abandoned and a steaming cup of tea left behind. Apparently the villagers' fear had won out over their hatred. Or perhaps it was just an early spring morning in a sleepy village. “Don’t feel compelled to wait, Herr Cabal.” 

“These inbred imbeciles might have enough motivation to make an example of you, Miss Barrow."

God, he was irritating. "I am shocked that you concern yourself." She looked down the tracks. "Is something troubling you, Cabal? I would have expected you to be brimming with glee at my departure."

Cabal rarely grunted, but the noise he emitted was close. She continued. "I should mention that I don't intend to grass you out to the police. It would be rude, not to mention ungrateful. And Twiccian might not be able to resist having you killed if you were imprisoned. He may not be able to resist anyway. What do you think we should we do?" 

"Your gratitude is not required." He made an effort to frame his thoughts in the most neutral terms available. “I believe you may have fallen into a misapprehension. I do not expect us to meet again. I do not see any advantages from further cooperation. You aided me once, and now I have done the same for you. This was not a promise of future help. I have my business, and you have yours." 

Leonie opened and closed her mouth while she assimilated this piece of information. She felt like a fool for being surprised. She seized on the least important part of his statement and attacked, to cover her confusion. "And since when do you return favours, Cabal? If your imposition last summer can be called a favour."

Since never, of course. His attitude towards any who were caught up in his researches was less "sink or swim" than "sink, or swim with an ambitious necromancer using you as a human stepping stone to reach the submarine tower before the vessel submerges. Goodbye.” Rather than address the question he picked up his bag and bowed slightly. " _Adieu_ , Miss Barrow. I wish you the best of luck."

“Wait.” He did. 

Leonie, with effort, set aside a desire to belabour him about the head with her valise. If only it were that simple. She looked at him in the sunlight that burned on the yellow brick of the station house. Black-gloved and Gladstone-bagged, a blot on the morning, a loathsome, thin-lipped figure of menace and fear. And all that was quite true. And it was true, what she had said in his awful crypt of a laboratory; that helping her didn’t cancel out his crimes, past, present, and (inevitably) future. And she had a terrible feeling that whatever he was doing, he would go a step too far. “What will you do with the zombie in your cellar?"

Cabal grimaced faintly. “Not a zombie, please. The…’ he caught her eye. “A few more tests, then I will have no more need of her. I’ll return her to death, then…’ he shrugged. “Into the furnace."

She persisted, “have you ever raised someone who seemed to understand what was happening to them?”

A small shake of his head. “Not for more than a minute, and that is only possible very soon after death. You overestimate the state of the art."

“And when, some day, you raise one who does understand?” 

“I cannot conjecture. Are you concerned by the state of my soul?” 

“God forbid. But perhaps someone should be. Now listen. I am about to share something that might grieve you, Cabal - heaven knows it grieves me - but consider this. We correspond. We have rendered each other significant aid, not always under duress. I suspect we even enjoy each other’s company. If it were anyone else, I’d say we were friends. I believe I am, at least, obliged to add you to my Christmas card list.” Cabal swayed as if buffeted by great and chaotic winds. 

“While I am almost complimented by the offer of… friendship, Miss Barrow, you yourself know it is a bad idea."

"It’s not an offer. I am being purely descriptive. So yes, if you’re cutting me loose now, then I suppose I’m wrong.” The early light cut under the brim of his hat. It struck sparks in his blond hair and made him narrow his eyes behind his blue spectacles; he had a few fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes where he frowned. “You’re not a monster. I’m sorry I said you were. You’re human.” His lip curled a little at that, and she half-laughed. “There’s no pleasing you. I’m trying to tell you to be careful. Don’t play with souls - for your own sake. And, god knows, maybe hers."

He looked hard at her, as if trying to understand what she was saying. She could see the moment he abandoned the attempt. He nodded coolly, turned, and walked down the platform without further comment.

Halfway down. He turned. "Opening move in the mail on Tuesday, Miss Barrow?"

She smiled. "Try not to lose too badly, Cabal."

“Do not send me a Christmas card.” 

Bicycling back home, to his solitary house and his experimental revenant in the cellar, Cabal felt an unusual moment of concord and content.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive the delay, gentle readers. I intended to have this out last weekend, but... well, I'd meant this to be my last Cabal & Leonie story, for a time, anyway. 
> 
> But - while I was sorting out where the story leaves our dauntless duo, I accidentally wrote the first line of the next one. And most of a chapter. And part of an outline, at least mentally. I'm not sure when it'll come out, but consider subscribing if you want to keep track. I think I'm going to have to set up a proper series for these stories now. And there might be more smut at some point.
> 
>  _Mille grazie_ for your kind attention and comments.


End file.
